Much has been written about the ways totalitarian governments redesign urban and rural terrain. They do so in order of solidifying their presence in the landscapes they seek to control using an aesthetic that mirrors their projected sense of power and importance. In these environments, massive structures — often cold and intimidating, carved from white stone — tower over the humans below.

Conversely, the shapes that are made in and of community spaces are far more fluid and dynamic. They may not emerge rendered in marble, or in the form of a building, square, or statue, but when it comes to scale and permanence, they leave imprints that endure beyond material expression — guiding the values, trajectories, and practices of those who inhabit them.

In the age of the media contractor, when most makers of “content” are expected to work remotely from the local cafe, community radio stations — especially those boasting long, historic lineages — are truly unique. Amid widespread social isolation, with most interactions now occurring online, their physical spaces are not just sites of organic cohesion, but incubators of the social and creative conditions from which foundational education and meaningful storytelling emerge. It is in spaces such as these, where diverse communities naturally intersect, that many develop a critical understanding of their social reality.

Democratising the airwaves: access, participation and representation

The significance of stations such as 2SER in the present moment becomes clearer when situated within the origins of community radio on Aboriginal land. Importantly, this origin story is not merely institutional or technical, but deeply embedded in broader social movements advocating for media access, representation and democratic participation. Community radio as it is understood today developed through these intersecting political, cultural, and educational pressures, which sought to challenge the concentration of broadcasting power and open up space for alternative voices.

As authors Anderson, Heather, Backhaus, Bridget, Fox, Juliet, Bedford, Charlotte note in Fifty Years of Resistance and Representation: A Historical Account of Australian Community Radio:

In Australia, the main agitators for a third sector in broadcasting came from four “distinct and unrelated threads of political, cultural and social movement” (Melzer 2020, n.p.) — ethnic communities, universities, grassroots/ left wing political groups and fine music enthusiasts, the earliest (and perhaps most unexpected) group to lobby for community radio. Each of these groups contributed a unique perspective to the social movement to expand media diversity, access, participation and representation.

It all started with the launch of the University of Adelaide’s 5UV, now Radio Adelaide, in June 1972. This was followed by a significant policy shift in 1974, when the Whitlam Government formally granted licences to the first community broadcasters, including 2MBS (Music Broadcasting Society of NSW) and 3MBS in Victoria. Together, these developments marked a turning point, enabling a broader wave of stations to emerge — among them 4ZZZ (1975), 3RRR (1976), and 3CR (1976) — which all helped to define the sector’s character and reach. By 1978, community broadcasting had been formally recognised in legislation, paving the way for continued expansion.

It was within this rapidly evolving landscape that Radio 2SER began broadcasting on October 1, 1979. Known as “Sydney Educational Radio” and jointly owned by Macquarie University and the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), 2SER was founded with a commitment to diverse, independent and educational programming. From the outset, 2SER featured specialist music programming alongside pioneering broadcasts amplifying voices that were regularly excluded from the mainstream. The early queer program Gaywaves debuted just a month after the station’s launch, emerging in a time when Sydney’s LGBTQ+ community was still grappling with the police violence of the first Sydney Mardi Gras in 1978, amid the escalating HIV/AIDS crisis, and under the continuing criminalisation of homosexual acts in most Australian states.

Throughout 2SER’s forty-six years, this pattern has continued: specialist music programs sit alongside cultural magazine style programs and current affairs shows, each show wondrously different and unique. All produced by unpaid individuals and communities united by their passion and commitment.

A school of intersectionality, organising principles and radio craft

Since the shocking news of its potential closure broke last week, there have been a raft of articles and social media posts written about the importance of 2SER-FM as a training ground for media professionals — which it most certainly is, absolutely.  The long, impressive and ever-growing list of alumni turned media identities is testament to that. But the education that happens in spaces like these extends far beyond the technicalities of radio craft like producing, presenting, and editing.  I know this not just in theory, but from personal experience. I became a volunteer at eighteen and remained an active broadcaster and member of the community for twelve years.

Though not immediately apparent, the far-reaching curriculum offered in a space like 2SER is immense and shaped by the lived experiences of those involved. At a time when I had little understanding of concepts like intersectionality, I was immersed in a framework for social and environmental justice rooted in the overlapping identities and struggles of those around me.  I learned what it meant to build inclusive coalitions, not just as a theoretical concept, but by means of tangible, everyday interactions. Through conversations both on and off air, and through programming that uplifted marginalised voices and exposed different ways of thinking. It was through 2SER that I also truly learnt the value of listening, as well as how to foster cohesion and harness collective agency.

This perspective is not mine alone. The programming grid and the physical sites of 2SER actively enable the coming together of a diverse range of voices, each with distinct identities, struggles, and experiences. This creates a unique environment of solidarity and shared purpose. Also integral to this dynamic is the station’s volunteer-driven structure, which naturally levels the playing field and cultivates a deep respect for everyone’s time and commitment. This shared investment fosters a collective understanding of what it means to contribute to something greater than oneself, as well as a way of acting and relating that extends way beyond the station environment, deeply influencing how the community engages with the world.

Whenever the time came to mobilise for a cause, the foundation for participation and collaboration was already in place: a network of people who believed that their individual efforts were not only valuable, but part of something larger, something that could drive real change.

I witnessed this firsthand in 2008, when a conversation sparked by an interview with a photographer from Palestine’s Aida Refugee Camp led to the idea of creating an online radio platform for interested participants in the camp’s community. In a matter of weeks, a plan was formed: the necessary equipment and software were identified, and a large-scale fundraising effort was set in motion. We were to throw a warehouse party, held in what had been the old Federal Police building on College Street. The process unfolded with remarkable ease. Five of the city’s most respected DJs — who each had a show on 2SER — volunteered their time and skills, coordinating logistics among themselves, organising equipment and arranging delivery to the venue. Others stepped forward to design posters, promote the event, staff the door, sell raffle tickets and manage the clean-up. All the necessary funds were raised then and there, driven entirely by the collective commitment and shared purpose of the 2SER community. What followed was not a fleeting outcome, but the establishment of a platform that, nearly two decades on, continues to tell local stories and serve its community, an enduring expression of the same ethos that made it possible.

What can’t be counted

An irreconcilable tension exists between a community ethos rooted in legacy, shared values, trust and connection, and a corporate logic that assesses worth through business metrics. The former is grounded in continuity, passion and reciprocal responsibility, the latter in abstraction and comparability. What cannot be counted using market-based frameworks, is often rendered marginal — even where it is central to social and cultural life.

On Monday night, this dissonance was laid bare at a town hall meeting called with only a few days’ notice, following a week of media coverage about the station’s financial position and its potential closure in July. The news came as a shock to a community that had long been active, invested, and resourceful, yet excluded from prior knowledge of the situation. The forum drew around 300 attendees, both in person and online, each seeking clarity on how the station had arrived at this point and with so little transparency.

Given two out of the three board members work for universities, perhaps this lack of clarity is not incidental but rather reflective of the culture and managerial systems within which contemporary universities now operate. They are spaces that prioritise financial performance, risk management and quantifiable outcomes. While 2SER is not a corporate entity but a registered charity with a distinct public charter and mission, its governance is nonetheless shaped in part by its institutional affiliations which render decision-making processes often deliberately opaque.

It was both enraging and heartbreaking to be faced by a lacklustre and defeatist panel which, instead of providing the room of passionate and concerned volunteers, alumni, listeners, and media enthusiasts with a sense of fight and a vision for transformation, offered reasons for why it would never work without Macquarie’s contribution. It really felt like they had already accepted it was gone. As retired professor of journalism at Monash University and one of the original 2SER presenters, Chris Nash said from his seat in the forum:

What I’m not hearing here tonight is any sort of passion or even vision about what role 2SER might play in a revamped environment … and so I support what the other questions have been here tonight about the timing, because we’re now in late April, there have been two articles in The Sydney Morning Herald this week, and then we get invited to a meeting tonight to discuss options, but we’re also told that July is pretty much a deadline. You can’t turn something around in three months.

So it seems to me that this is a communications exercise, with all due respect … for a decision that’s already been made.

The panel’s infuriating response might, in its most sympathetic reading, also be understood within the broader context of a university sector that has been systematically destabilised over recent decades, and more acutely in recent years through funding cuts and sustained staff action. Within such conditions, a kind of institutional fatigue takes hold, one that narrows the scope of what is perceived as possible. For those embedded within these systems and not directly accountable to the station’s volunteer community, the potential closure of 2SER may register as just another inevitability in a long sequence of job losses and faculty closures.

To view 2SER through this lens, however, is to fundamentally misread its role: it is not a university department to be rationalised, but a historic and powerful community institution with a reach and responsibility that extends far beyond the university sector.

The 2SER airwaves as democratic infrastructure

The main studios of 2SER-FM sit within a short, five-minute stroll of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The geographic proximity stages a quiet but persistent juxtaposition. Two broadcasting sites occupy the same urban terrain while embodying markedly different relationships to power, voice and public life. Their closeness serves as a reminder of their key distinctions.

One is a site of citizens’ media — facilitating media diversity, access, participation and representation. A place where communities actively enact citizenship as a lived daily practice. Here, knowledge circulates laterally through shared studios, informal mentorship, collective problem-solving and a passionate commitment to the community, listeners, and station as a whole. The infrastructure is modest, often — as we are reminded right now — precarious, but it functions as a training ground for both technical craft and political imagination. In this sense, 2SER operates not just as a broadcaster, but as an incubator of democratic culture, its alumni carrying forward practices shaped by collaboration, dissent and accountability to community.

The other is a national institution, publicly funded yet structured as a corporation through the frameworks of professionalism and scale. At the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, media content is produced by trained professionals whose labour is remunerated within an economic system that necessitates wages for survival — rent, mortgages, food, transport, healthcare. Its outputs are shaped by editorial standards, bureaucratic processes, and the pressures that accompany operating at a national level: scrutiny, risk management and the need for broad appeal. While this institution plays an essential role in informing the public and maintaining journalistic standards, its distance from the immediacy of grassroots democratic participation is stark.

To read these two sites side by side is not to position them as opposites, but to understand them as occupying different points along a spectrum of democratic infrastructure. In a post-truth world, at a time of ongoing genocide, ecocide, war, rising authoritarianism and censorship — when public discourse is increasingly consolidated, surveilled, and contested — the continued existence of spaces like 2SER becomes critical. The survival of 2SER is more than a question of cultural value: it is a question of our commitment to democracy which simply cannot ever be fully realised within institutional frameworks alone.

You can support the call to save 2SER-FM here.

Image: Wikimedia Commons